The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  There was a way back for married priests, but it involved not only repudiation of wife and family and banishment from the dioceses in which they had previously worked, but also the ritual humiliation of public penance. A display of what Rogers could have expected had he been willing to return to the Catholic fold took place on 4 November 1554. This is what happened at Paul’s Cross that day to three married priests, one a former canon of the Priory of Elsing Spital, one a Black Friar (or Dominican) and the third an Austin Friar (one has to remember that all these priests would have been dispossessed of their monastic life under Henry and adapted to changed circumstances; now they were being dispossessed again, this time of their family life, as well as of their dignity):

  And this was their penance: first to come out of the vestry with sheets upon their backs, and each of them a rod in their hands with a taper lit, and first came and kneeled before the high altar, and there the suffragan gave them their discipline [i.e. struck them with the rod]; and then went down before the cross: and when the preacher had taken his benediction of the Bishop in the middle of the church, they came down unto the Bishop, and kneeled down in the middle of the church, and there had their disciplines of him, and he kissed them; and so went unto the cross, and stood there all the sermon time, and when he came unto the biddings they turned unto the preacher and kneeled down and asked forgiveness there of him, and then he showed their opinions openly in the pulpit.

  The preacher on this occasion was Dr Nicholas Harpsfield, Archdeacon of Canterbury, who played a leading part throughout Mary’s reign in the persecution of Protestants.

  By the time these three priests underwent their experience of readmission to ministry, Rogers had been incarcerated in Newgate prison for over nine months, having been removed from the relative comfort of his own house on 27 January. Bishop Bonner was partly behind this move; perhaps he had had enough of having a recalcitrant clergyman occupying a house in his cathedral close, and of being reminded of him every time he walked into the cathedral. But the fact that the move occurred only two days after the start of an ar med rebellion spearheaded by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the impetus for which was primarily anger and fear at the prospect of the Queen’s proposed marriage to a (Catholic) foreigner, Philip II of Spain, the son of Emperor Charles V, would also suggest that the City authorities were anxious to ensure that a Protestant as prominent as Rogers was securely under lock and key during this time of instability and potential danger to the Queen. (The Wyatt rebellion and its failure also had the consequence of Lady Jane Grey being executed in February. She had been tried and condemned towards the end of the previous year, but there had been some hope her life would be spared; the involvement of her father on the side of Wyatt put paid to that hope.) The insecurity suffered by Rogers’s wife and ten children (an eleventh was conceived while he was under house arrest) – and his consequent anxiety about them – must have been considerable, as theirs was officially a cathedral house, from which they could have been ousted at any time. He was also receiving no stipend, despite legally being still the incumbent of St Sepulchre’s. So both he and his family were in desperate need, the costs of board and lodging in prison being at the prisoner’s, or their friends’, expense, as we have already seen in the case of Anne Askew.

  Newgate was a very unpleasant place to be at this period, the atmosphere being ‘fetid and corrupt’. A yeoman of the guard, a fervent Protestant called Edward Underhill, was sent there in 1553 for having written a ballad against the Queen and he left a vivid description of ‘the evil savours and great unquietness of the lodgings’, emphasizing how hard it was to bear ‘so much noise of prisoners, and evil savours’. The smell that came out of the kitchens was one of the worst. Other unpleasant smells were caused by the airlessness of the damp old stone buildings, and the fact that many of the prisoners were kept under ground. One of the greatest hardships for Rogers, apart from now being separated from his wife and children, was that he was also separated from his books. The company of the people who loved him and the freedom to write and study had been of immense support to him during his house imprisonment; now these comforts were withdrawn.

  During his subsequent trial Rogers claimed to have had no idea of what was going on in the world outside while he was in Newgate, including the fact that, on the last day of November 1554, St Andrew’s day, the Church in England was officially reunited with the Church of Rome, to the great joy of the Queen and the overt (or stage-managed) joy of everyone else. Parliament had met in the days leading up to the ‘day of reconciliation’ to vote on the matter, though as the preparations must all have been in place by then, the vote could hardly have been expected to be ‘no’. Rather, it was intended as a public display of assent, with only two Commons members out of 440 having the courage to vote against reunion with Rome. On the day itself the chapter of the Order of the Garter met at Westminster and a Solemn Mass was celebrated in the Abbey, attended by about 500 other English people and 600 people connected to Philip II of Spain, Mary’s husband and King of England since 25 July (for, despite the considerable opposition at court and throughout the country to this marriage, Mary had insisted on going through with it). Later, at the Palace of Westminster, the Queen sat on a dais, flanked by King Philip on her left and her distant relative Cardinal Reginald Pole, fully vested as a papal legate, on her right. Bishop Stephen Gardiner, now Lord Chancellor (he had been in that post since the early days of Mary’s reign), read out the resolution of the preceding day of both Houses of Parliament. The climax of the ceremony came when Cardinal Pole pronounced the absolution: ‘after a short address in which he once more referred to England’s true Christian past, he absolved the kingdom of the sin of schism in the name of the three Persons of the Trinity. There were then “Amens”, and Mary is recorded as having wept throughout.’

  John Deane would have been involved in the celebrations two days later, on the first Sunday of Advent, when Cardinal Pole and King Philip came to the City and to St Paul’s Cathedral, with a great retinue, the cardinal arriving by boat from Lambeth Palace, the King by land from Westminster. The scene was described by Machyn:

  The 2 day of December did come to Paul’s all priests and clerks with their copes and crosses, and all the crafts in their livery, and my Lord Mayor and the Aldermen, against my Lord Cardinal’s coming; and at the Bishop of London’s place my Lord Chancellor and all the bishops tarrying for my Lord Cardinal coming, that was at 9 of the clock, for he landed at Baynard’s Castle; and there my Lord Mayor received him, and brought him to Paul’s, and so my Lord Chancellor and my Lord Cardinal and all the bishops went up into the quire with their mitres; and at 10 of the clock the King’s Grace came to Paul’s to hear mass with 400 of guard, 100 English, 100 High Almains, 100 Spaniards, 100 Swissmen, and many lords and knights, and heard mass. Both the Queen’s Chapel and the King’s and Paul’s choir sang.

  The music composed for this great occasion included a motet by the Franco-Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso, who was present in London at the time, entitled Te spectant, Reginalde, poli (‘The heavens observe you, Reginald’). Here the author of the text, probably di Lasso himself, was indulging in wordplay, with the similarity between the word for ‘heavens’ (poli) and the cardinal’s surname, Pole. Bishop Gardiner preached to an enormous congregation outside (totalling about 15,000) from Paul’s Cross pulpit on the theme of restoration and the end of the nightmare provoked by Henry VIII’s split from Rome and, at the conclusion, everyone present knelt to receive absolution.

  With the English Church reconciled to Rome, the position of the imprisoned Protestants (for Rogers was only one of several) became more immediately perilous. In January 1555 Parliament re-enacted the heresy laws of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, which had been repealed under Edward VI, thereby bringing back the death penalty for heresy. On 22 January, only the second day after the re-enacted laws came into force, Lord Chancellor Gardiner summoned all the Protestant clergy currently imprisoned in London to his house at St Mary Overy
to inform them of the Queen’s clemency if they would abandon their previous teaching. The officials assembled alongside the Lord Chancellor included the bishops of Durham (Cuthbert Tunstall once again), Worcester (Nicholas Heath, who would succeed Gardiner as Lord Chancellor and whom Rogers referred to as ‘my former master’, relating to his time as a student at Cambridge) and Ely (Thomas Thirlby), Lord William Paget, Lord William Howard, Secretary Sir John Bourne and Sir Richard Southwell. It is possible that other members of the Privy Council were also present, but these are the names mentioned by Rogers himself in his account of the proceedings. He succeeded in the last days of his life in writing a record of his trial (if it can be called that); he hid the document in his cell, and his wife and one of his sons, Daniel, retrieved it after his death. Whether he had somehow managed to indicate its existence to them or, more likely, let them know that he hoped to be able to write such an account, or whether they were merely searching the cell by chance, looking for any small memento of him, is a matter of conjecture.

  Lord Chancellor Gardiner began by asking the prisoner, John Rogers, whether he was aware of the present state of the realm. ‘No, my Lord,’ replied Rogers, ‘I have been kept in close prison, and apart from some general things said at the table, when I was at dinner or supper, I have heard nothing.’

  ‘General things, general things!’ replied Gardiner, mockingly. ‘You have surely heard of my Lord Cardinal’s arrival, sir, and that the whole Parliament has received his blessing.’ Gardiner went on to tell Rogers of how all but one of the 160 members of the House of Lords had assented to the reunification with Rome and received pardon for the schism. ‘How say you?’ he then demanded. ‘Are you content to unite and knit yourself to the faith of the Catholic Church, with us? Will you do that?’

  Rogers, like Anne Askew before him, chose to interpret the word ‘catholic’ in its wider sense, and replied that he never had and never would dissent from the catholic Church. ‘No,’ Gardiner said crossly, ‘I’m talking about the state of the Catholic Church as it now is in England, having received the Pope as supreme head.’

  Rogers was uncompromising in his reply: ‘I know no other head but Christ of his catholic Church, neither will I acknowledge the Bishop of Rome to have any more authority than any other Bishop.’ (This formulation concerning the Pope was precisely what Henry VIII had demanded his subjects swear to when he had separated the English Church from Rome.) But Gardiner hoped he could now catch him out. ‘So why,’ he asked, ‘did you acknowledge Henry VIII to be supreme head of the Church, if Christ is the only head?’ Rogers was ready for this question. ‘I never granted him to have supremacy in spiritual things,’ he replied, ‘such as the forgiveness of sins, or the giving of the Holy Ghost, or authority to be a judge above the word of God …’

  At this point Cuthbert Tunstall and Nicholas Heath joined Gardiner in laughing. If Rogers had dared to say any such thing at the time, they sniggered, he wouldn’t be alive now. (The ability of these men to laugh at the changes in what was required of subjects of the Tudor monarchs suggests they possessed a pragmatism which was entirely beyond the reach of the serious single-minded type of man exemplified by Rogers. Again, like Rich and Deane, perhaps these men, with their lighter approach to belief and vows, were more ‘of their time’ than those who would rather go to the fire than contradict themselves.) But Rogers had clearly thought all this out before, and probably many times. He wanted to explain to them what precisely was meant, in his view, by the royal supremacy, ‘but they looked and laughed one upon another, and made a business of it’, so that he was forced to let the matter drop.

  The Lord Chancellor now took it upon himself to explain to Lord Howard, who may have been looking mystified at these exchanges, that it was perfectly possible for both Christ and the bishop of Rome to be supreme heads of the Church. Rogers tried to join in the discussion, to demonstrate that Gardiner was, in his view, talking nonsense, but before he could do so, Gardiner demanded again: ‘What say you? Make us a direct answer, whether you will or will not be a member of the Catholic Church, with us.’ But Rogers still wanted to address the question of the Pope. ‘My Lord,’ he protested, ‘I cannot believe that you yourselves really think in your hearts that he is supreme head in the forgiving of sins, for you and others of this realm have now been preaching and writing the opposite for 20 years, and Parliament also decided this so long ago …’

  ‘Tush, man!’ Gardiner interrupted him angrily. ‘That Parliament was forced, with great cruelty, to abolish and reject the primacy of the Bishop of Rome.’

  ‘With cruelty?’ responded Rogers at once. ‘Well, in that case, I see you’re going the wrong way about this, trying to persuade men’s consciences with cruelty, while it appears from the way you’re talking now that the cruelty used then did not persuade your consciences. Why then do you think you can use cruelty to persuade ours?’

  Gardiner, backed up by Lord Paget, insisted that the difference was that Parliament had now freely, and virtually unanimously, elected to return to the Catholic fold, whereas under Henry’s Parliament there had been no possibility of a free choice being exercised. But Rogers was unconvinced, and attempted to continue the discussion. ‘Why then, my Lord,’ he said, ‘what conclusion do you draw from that? That the first Parliament was of lesser authority, because only a few agreed with it, and this last Parliament of great authority, because more agreed with it? That should not be the test, my Lord, whether more or fewer agree, but which is wiser, truer and godlier …’ He would have gone on, but the Lord Chancellor interrupted him again with the demand for a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to his question. ‘We haven’t got all day,’ he expostulated – ‘we’ve more people to speak to than just you.’

  Rogers now asked for pen, ink and books, so that he could set out clearly in writing why he could not agree with the return to Rome, and declared he would be very willing to enter into a written discussion with anyone who disagreed with him. But this suggestion was bluntly rejected. ‘No, that shall not be permitted you,’ said Gardiner. ‘You shall never be offered another chance like this, if you turn it down.’ And he added, chillingly: ‘There are two things – mercy and justice; if you refuse the Queen’s mercy now, then you shall have justice ministered to you.’

  Still Rogers would not back down. ‘I never offended nor was disobedient to Her Grace,’ he declared, ‘yet I will not refuse her mercy.’ But if they would not engage in serious dialogue with him in writing, then he felt he had to remind them that it was they themselves who had first brought him to understand when he was a young man, twenty years ago, that the Bishop of Rome had only a ‘pretended primacy’ – ‘and will you now,’ he protested, ‘have me to say and do the contrary? I cannot be so persuaded.’

  ‘If you will not admit the Bishop of Rome to be supreme head of the Catholic Church, then you will never have the Queen’s mercy, you may be sure,’ responded Gardiner. And then he asserted that he could not possibly engage in serious discussion with Rogers, as he was requesting, because St Paul had instructed in the letter to Titus that heretics should be avoided and not spoken to after one or two warnings. ‘First prove that I am a heretic,’ retorted Rogers, ‘and then quote the text from Titus.’

  But ‘still the Lord Chancellor played on one string’, as Rogers put it, demanding whether Rogers would enter into the one Catholic Church, or not. Rogers insisted that he needed to find the Pope’s headship ratified in the scriptures before he would accept it. At this, Bishop Nicholas Heath interjected that the answer was in the creed – ‘credo ecclesiam sanctam catholicam’ (‘I believe in the holy catholic Church’) – but Rogers maintained his original argument: ‘I find not the Bishop of Rome there; for catholic does not mean the Church of Rome: it means the consensus of all true teaching churches of all times and of all ages: but how can the Bishop of Rome be one of them, as he teaches so many doctrines that are plainly and directly against the word of God? Should someone who does that be head of the catholic Church? It is not
possible.’ Gardiner demanded Rogers tell him just one doctrine taught by the Pope that was against the word of God. ‘All right, I will,’ said Rogers, and he went on to assert that saying, singing and reading everything in their services in Latin was plainly against the instructions given in the fourteenth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians. ‘I deny it,’ said Gardiner, ‘I deny it is against the word of God. How can you prove that it is?’ Rogers quoted the text he had in mind: ‘For he that speaketh with tongues speaketh not unto men, but unto God.’ Gardiner agreed that in that case a man would be speaking to God. ‘Well, then,’ said Rogers, ‘it is of no use to men.’ ‘No,’ replied the Lord Chancellor, ‘for one man speaks in one tongue and another in another, and all well.’ ‘No,’ insisted Rogers, quoting another text from the same chapter – ‘when you speak with tongues, unless you speak words that have signification, how shall it be understood what is spoken? For you shall but speak in the air’ – and being anxious to prove how these two texts agreed. ‘For they must agree,’ he said, demonstrating a very Protestant understanding of the scriptures, ‘as they are both sayings of the Holy Ghost, spoken by the apostle St Paul – that is, to speak not to men but to God, and to speak to the wind.’ And he, like the scholar and biblical exegete he was, wanted to carry on and set out his proof, but the prelates and other men around him all began to talk at once.

  ‘To speak to God, and not to God, is impossible!’ cried the Lord Chancellor. ‘I will prove it possible,’ said Rogers. ‘No,’ said Lord Howard to Gardiner, ‘now I will bear you witness that he’s talking rubbish; for first he said that those who speak in a strange language are speaking to God, and now he says the opposite, that they speak neither to God nor to man.’ Rogers tried to explain to Howard, who was no theologian: ‘I have quoted one text, and now another, and they must agree, and I can make them agree; but as for you, you don’t understand what it’s about.’ ‘I understand enough to know it isn’t possible,’ declared Lord Howard. And now, wanting to break up the discussion, the secretary, Sir John Bourne, whispered to Gardiner: ‘This is a point of sophistry.’ Then Gardiner began to tell Howard how, in Holland, they had at one time said the whole of their service in Dutch, but then they began to do part in Latin and part in Dutch. ‘Yes, it was like that at Wittenberg too,’ Nicholas Heath interjected. Rogers tried to explain that this was in a university, where most men understood Latin, and he was still trying to make himself heard, anxious to continue and prove his point, but they were no longer listening to him. ‘There is no remedy but to let them alone, and commit the matter to God,’ he concluded miserably. His frustration at not being allowed to prove his point almost leaps off the page. He was of course fighting for his life (or would have been, if they had let him) – ‘but it was impossible, for one asked one thing, another said another, that I was forced to hold my peace and let them talk: and when I would have taken hold of my proof, my Lord Chancellor bade me go back to prison again’.